The sights in Peru were astounding. But the places I visited in Peru were over touristed. There was a distance between the tourist areas and the locals that was difficult to overcome. It is a little easier in Ecuador. We landed in the capital, Quito, on October 1st. The old city is beautiful and well maintained. We stayed in a hostel, the Secret Garden, which overlooks the whole historic area. And more than that it is a place to meet and talk with other travellers. We stayed quite a while in Quito; 10 days. We made a day trip to the famous markets in Otovallo. That was interesting, but not quite what I expected. We also spent a couple days in Banos, which is much more lush than the Quito area, has loads of waterfalls near town, and takes its name from the hotspring pools in town. Appearantly Incan emporers used to bath there for its medicinal purposes. It is the kind of place that I would stay longer if I had more time. From there we spent the night in a hostel near the mountain of Cotopaxi. That was really pretty. While we enjoyed main land Ecuador the echanted Galapagos islands were calling and we set off for a new adventure.

I have taken some crappy tours in my day. The sand dune tour of Mui Ne Vietnam comes to mind immediately, but there have been more. Many more. I am not saying this was the worst…but it was up there. Just for the record, if you go to Arequipa Peru and are short on time DO NOT take the full day trip to Colca Canyon. Just sleep in and enjoy the town for what it is. Have a coffee and do some souvenier shopping. From what I hear those with a more leisurely schedule have a much better time at the Colca Canyon. I can´t speak for them.

Arequipa itself is a pleasant town. It is full of old big white buildings that have a mediterranean look to them. On our first day in town we visited a 400 year old convent. The nuns there live in poverty and silence completely isolated from the rest of the world. There are currently 21 nuns, but our tour guide said that at its height there were over 400 nuns and female servants. That sounds simultaneously really boring and the perfect back story for a adult movie. Anyway, I digress.

 The full day Colca Canyon tour. It really was a full day tour. The whole idea was to see the Peruvian condors flying majestically above the breath taking canyon. They picked us up at 2:30 in the morning. The tour started before I usually get to bed on the weekends. Strike one. We spent the next hour and a half driving around town picking up other passengers. An hour and a half that I could have been sleeping. Strike two. Finally the bus got underway. I put in my earplugs, pulled my sleeping mask over my eyes and tried to make myself comfortable. Three hours later we were dropped off for our ´included´breakfast. Hard rolls with jam and tea. Yummy. Now I am just plain grumpy. Explictives are muttered under my breath. The other tour group sharing our bus finally returns from breakfast and we reboard to go see some condors. Yeah. Only, they had garlic rolls from breakfast. I know because when I ask the guy in the seat next to me I could smell it on his breath. He promptly sneezed into his hand. His upper lip glistened with snot. Fucking great. A snotty sneezy garlicy fucking German next to me. Let´s not get chatty pal. I pulled open the window and pressed my face towards the slot of fresh air. An hour passes. I remind myself that I am paying for this. I paid ten beers for this. Is it too late to trade back? We arrive at the condor viewing area. There are loads of tourists. No condors. An hour passes. Fewer tourists and still no condors. Our bus is due to pick us up at 10:30. At 5 minuts to 11 the condors come out. Look at that. Pretty. I could be well into my fourth beer watching this on youtube. I snap some photos. OK. I saw a huge beautiful bird of prey in the wild. Now for the four hour bus ride back to the hotel. Not so fast champ. There are still a bevy of uninteresting stops to make including hotsprings (which the Israelis on the bus boycott and inspires everyone else to follow suit. Politics aside, I love the Israelis) and an overpriced lunch. Again the Israelis boycott. I hate being dropped off in a tourist trap restaurant on a tour. I am paying for the tour. Don´t try to mooch extra from me. We watch to the town center and have a very good authentic Peruvian lunch for a third of the tourist buffet price. Enough with the cheesy tours. On to Ecuador.

Getting to Machu Picchu is not difficult, but it does require some advance planning.  Pop and I were rather more lackadaisical in our planning efforts. We wandered into the train station the day before we wanted to go and tried to buy tickets. Luckily for us there were internet terminals where you could make your purchases online and print your ticket out at the counter.  We were presented with a such a limited hodgepodge of choices that there is no way we could have figure this out in Spanish. We ultimately ended up booking a train for the next day leaving out of a town called Ollyantambo. That morning we got up fairly early and made our way by collectivo to Ollyantambo, spent a few hours sitting around and going to the market, then caught the train to the town Aguas Calientes. It is a collection of restaurants and hotels with some kinda dirty hotspring fed pools in easy walking distance. I found it lacking character. Like Disney land without rides. Perhaps my unfavorable image of the town has something to do with my time there. Since we took the train up, we needed to get up super early (4:40) in the morning to catch the first wave of buses to Machu Picchu to be there in time to watch the sunrise. Anticipating a long day ahead we went to bed around 8pm to try to get some sleep. Around 8:30 a club across the street turned the volume up to 11. It was then that I realized I forgot to pack my earplugs. The party picked up steam, culminating in a very enthusiastic drum session around 1:45am. It sounded fun. It sounded like the kind of experience you wouldn´t want to miss….unless you had to get up in three hours.

The alarm went off, we rolled out of bed and were in line for the buses by a quarter after 5. There were about 50 people ahead of us. Right on time the buses started rolling. We made it to the gates by a little before 6, got our Waynapicchu stamps and headed in to see the place. WOW. It was really amazing; worth rising before dawn even. It got even better when we got a guide. Appearantly Machu Picchu was used as some sort of agricultural and astronomical laboratory because both jungle crops and highland Andean crops would grow there because of it unique geographical location. Well, it looked great for being 600 years old. There is another peak nearby, Waynna Picchu, that priests used to climb for more astronomical studies. That was a hike to get up, but also well worth it. From there we could see the whole complx spread out below us. Really cool. We took the bus down a little early and had some Peruvian nachos: guacamole with some schredded cheese on top. Then it was on the train back to Ollyantambo. This experience was probably the highlight of Peru.

OK, so it was´t actually the Amzon river, but a major river that joins with the Amazon further down the line in Brazil. Still, there is no denying that is was jungle. The name of the river was the Madre de Dios, as in Mother of God who knew there could be some many stinging biting insects all at the same place and time. We eventually ended up in the Manu biopreserve. I thought summer Texas was inhospitable (what with the heat and mosquitoes and fire ants and all), but the bar has now been raised. I have been out of the jungle for four days now and I still itch. My paranoid fear is that I am host to some parasite and that in a month flies will burst from my arms. We will see. Agressive insects aside trip was great.

To get there we had to take a 10 hour bus ride and a 6 hour boat trip to this little town called Boca Manu. It has about 400 residents and the areas only airstrip. I also only has electricity from 6pm to 9pm and is not accessible by road. Villagers there still regularly go into the jungle and hunt for wild pigs, monkeys, and just about anything else they can get in their sights. By the time the trip was over Boca Manu seemed like comfortable civilization.

The first day in we went to a Macaw clay lick. This was nothing short of spectacular. Really. Hundreds of parrots and dozens of red macaws descend on this one short strip of clay bank to eat the minerals in the clay. It was a teeming collage of flying color. Brilliant reds, emerald greens, and bright blues in the trees and on the banks. I found the most interesting part to be the system of lookouts and the order of eating that the macaws used. They live up to 40 years in the wild and since there are probably only 4 or 5 dozen in the area they all probably know each other and are in some way related. They set up a whole rotating picket line to look for predators while their friends cling to the side of the bank and eat clay. They also mate for life so they almost always move in pairs. You rarely see just one macaw. It was a really neat experience. I have great pictures, but it will be a while before I get around to posting those.

The next day we went further into the preserve. It rained that morning and the caimans (they look like little alligators) were all out on the banks sunning themselves. We stayed in little screened in huts, ate breakfast by 5:30, and spent probably 8 hours a day walking through the jungle looking at plants and animals. It was exhausting, but so worth it. We say many kinds of monkeys, caimans, river otters, more kinds of birds than I can name and, of course, insects and spiders. LOTS of spiders and mosquitos. Luckily I got my yellow fever vaccine before I left. As you can imagine the plant life was abundant and varied. The two most interesting plants I saw were the holli tree and the walking tree. The holli tree grows with a hollow trunk and periodic holes in its side specifically for the purpose of playing host to a kind of ant they call fire ants. Only there fire ants are much worse. Four or five bites will give you fever and make you bed ridden; a dozen is likely fatal. Our guide said the natives used to (may still) use the tree as (capital) punishment. What a way to go.  The walking tree extends its roots a good four feet from the ground and can over time move its position a couple meters to get better sunlight by growing new roots in the direction it wants to move and letting the older roots rot away. Neat.

 At the end of the trip everyone in the group put together their memory cards and we burned all the pictures to dvd for everyone. THEY got some great pictures which I will share later. I got some so so pictures I will post today. Cheers everyone.

First of all, as I write this post I am deep within the Amazon basin, drinking a cold 1 liter of beer and sitting next to a teenager playing some online Japanese game. The internet connection is slow, but what can you expect when you have to stop the bus to wait for pigs to get off the road.   It has been a fun and productive couple days. We saw the inside on one of the main cathedrals in town. OK, I knew alot of gold came out of here when the Spanish rolled over the Incans, but Holy Cow. The everything inside of this church (actually a bishopric) is coated in gold. The craftmanship of the carvings was remarkable and the gaudiness came close to Rome. There is a cool adapation of the Last Supper, but in this one Jesus and the apostles are about to dig into some guinea pig…more on that subject later. We also got a great last minute deal on an 8 day trip to the Manu biopreserve (Amazon basin).

With only a day left in Cusco before we set off we got up early and headed to a vaguely indicated spot in my Footprints guide to catch a bus to Pisac, a place with amazing Incan ruins. Instead of the bus though we found collectivos; private cars that wait to fill up and go from town to town. It was alot faster than the bus. We walked around the ruins for about 4 hours. They were really well preserved for being hundreds of years old. I guess there wasn´t much gold there. They were by far the best ruins yet…although Machu Picchu is still to come.  

The bus picked us up at 6am this morning and we set out for the Manu preserve. It takes 10 hours by car and another 7 by boat to get there….so this will be my last post for a while. Today we did the 10 hours in the bus and, unlike driving from Texas to my grandparents in Kansas, this was interesting. We saw some pre Incan graves out in the high desert, that was neat. But the most interesting part was watching the geography change. We started on the dry side of the mountain (and drove about 5 hours on that side), but as soon as we crossed the range and headed down everything was green and lush. It is really beautiful here. More to come on my Amazon adventure and some pictures (promise). Cheers.

It was a long day of travel complete with the obligitory delays, bad food and screaming children but we eventually made it into Lima. All I saw of the city was from the windows of two taxis as after an insufficient 6 hours of sleep we got up and went back to the airport to catch a flight to Cuzco…the city of the Incas (there will be no apostrophes in this post as I have yet to master the Spanish keyboard and I keep getting ç instead); the ancient capital of a sprawling empire; a modern day tourist Mecca complete with Irish pubs, Italian restaurants, and hostel signs in Hebrew. It is a neat blend of old Spanish influence built upon older Incan architechture. Some of the dogs here even have collars. Cuzco is really high. There are cultral shamanic tours you can take where the local descendants of the Incans will whip up a hallucinagenic brew for you and take you on a spiritual trip, but that is not what I mean. It is at 11000 feet and I flew in froom sea level. The altitude is killing me. Last night I got a terrible headache and I have been tired all day. I know….poor me. Luckily there are drugs for this sort of thing. Better living through chemistry I say. The cocao leaf tea helps too 🙂

 So, today as dad and I were walking around the town tour guides kept asking me if I had seen sexy woman. “Well, yes, many times thank you, but what is it to you” is what I was thinking, but what I said was “No.” Finally I stopped to listen. I mean, hold on dad, lets see where he is going with this. Could be an interesting cultural phenomenon. Could be. And let me tell you folks……it was. Today I went on a tour to sexy woman with a bus load of people. Only, they spell it Saqsayhuaman and it is the remains of a huge Incan temple. We saw lots of Incan stuff today. Walls mostly; they were pretty neat in there own right, but with a little imagination you could see how they were spectacular. Turns out saqsayhuaman in the local tongue means satisfied stomach. See, the Spaniards killed so many local warriors at this site that the buzzards ate until they had satisfied stomachs…and like so many unfortunate nicknames it stuck. The temple, or what remains of it after it was razed and looted, is architechurally amazing. The way they carved each stone to fit into the stones around it boggles the mind…especially given what they had to work with. Oh, and I bought a hat. Good times. Tomorrow we are going to book a tour to the Amazon and check out the many cathedrals around town. With any luck, guinea pig will be on the menu. Oh yeah.

and all through the house last minute preparations were being made for six weeks of travel in the developing world; Peru and Ecuador to be specific. Tomorrow Dad and I set out for a South American adventure. It all starts with a 14 hour transit to Lima. We have hotel reservations for our first night and a flight to Cusco booked for the very next day. It will be alot of travel, but I am excited to get there. Let the good times begin……………..